(Update)US efforts to scuttle Iran-UAE ties fail – Obama’s “Coalition of the Willing” Against Iran? Iranian Commander: Bush’s Iran War Plan Delivered to Obama
US efforts to scuttle Iran-UAE ties fail
By Kimia Sanati
TEHRAN – Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)have begun top-level talks to boost economic relations, despite efforts by the United States to disrupt trade ties and an unresolved territorial dispute over the three strategic islands of Abu Mousa, the Lesser and the Greater Tunb in the Strait of Hormuz.
The UAE is already Iran’s top trade partner with bilateral trade reaching US$14 billion, according to official sources.
The US, concerned about Iran’s plans to develop nuclear know-how, “has tried to hurt the Iranian economy through unilateral sanctions,” an observer in Tehran told Inter Press Service (IPS).
“They consider UN sanctions too mild to achieve enough pressure on Iran to halt its nuclear program. To bring the Iranian economy to its knees the US has been encouraging and even putting pressure on all Iran’s trade partners, including the UAE, to stop dealing with Iran. This can and has hurt much more than the UN sanctions.”
At the forefront of efforts by the US to curb local trade with Iran are foreign banks with branches in the UAE. These continue to deal with firms that have Iranian partners, “but they are more cautious – they scrutinize them more when extending facilities”, Nasser Hashempour, executive deputy president of the Dubai-based Iranian Business Council, said this month, according to a report on the MiddleEast Online website.
UAE-based branches of international banks have “asked most Iranian individuals who have personal accounts with them to close their accounts”, Hashempour said.
Many international banks, including British-Asian bank HSBC, Deutsche Bank and Swiss giants UBS and Credit Suisse, have stopped dealing with Iran in line with sanctions imposed by the US to pressure Tehran into halting its program of uranium enrichment, the report said.
Yet “stopping trade with Iran is in no way in the best interests of the UAE, which has the greater share of the lucrative trade relations, and hence their big dilemma is whether to relent to the US pressure and keep Americans happy or serve their own national interests and economy”, the observer said.
Bilateral trade between the UAE and the US fell 25% to $2.67 billion during the first quarter of last year compared with the same period of the previous year, according to the BusinessIntelligence Middle East website, citing US Department of Commerce data. UAE imports from the US fell 26% to $2.36 billion in the period compared with a year earlier, while UAE exports to the US fell by 7% to $307.6 million, cutting by 29% the UAE balance of trade deficit with the US, the website reported.
Trade between the US and the UAE declined 16% to $5.43 billion during the first half of 2007, ArabianBusiness.com reported, citing the US Bureau of Statistics.
Last May, Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmadinejad became the first Iranian president since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 to visit the UAE. This was reciprocated last week by Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid, prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, in a rare, top-level visit. He reiterated his country’s stance, expressed earlier at a joint press conference with Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, that Iran had a right to peaceful nuclear technology.
Importantly, the sheikh also said Iran was no threat to regional states. “Allegations by aliens the US that Iran is a threat to the region are vague, as regional states share a lot of historic and contemporary common grounds,” the UAE premier was quoted by reporters as saying.
“The UAE prime minister’s visit is proof that US policies will not have any impact in the region,” Ahmadinejad said during his meeting with Sheikh Mohammad.
Ahmadinejad has offered to provide regional Arab countries that have their own nuclear ambitions with Iranian nuclear know-how. Referring to Iran’s nuclear technology, he told the visiting UAE prime minister that Iran was fully prepared to “put its valuable achievements” at the UAE’s disposal.
The visit, a little more than a month after one to the UAE by US President George Bush, sparked speculation about a nuclear message being relayed by the UAE prime minister to Tehran.
Iran’s ambassador in the UAE, Hamid-Reza Assefi, rejected the speculation. Sheikh Mohammad “just informed us of his country’s stance regarding Iran’s nuclear issue and said Iran had a right to have access to peaceful nuclear technology”, the Iranian ambassador was quoted as saying by semi-official Fars News Agency.
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), of which the UAE is a member, acknowledges all nations’ right to peaceful nuclear energy but has concerns about a nuclear Iran. Other members are Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain.
A report, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), by the US intelligence bodies in December 2007 seems to have put the minds of Iran’s Arab neighbors at greater ease as to the nature of its nuclear program. The report said that Iran’s nuclear program had not been of a military nature since 2003.
The NIE report has done little to alter Bush’s policy towards Iran. In January during an official visit to the UAE, he accused Iran once again of sponsoring terrorism. The US president said Iran’s actions threatened the security of nations everywhere and promised that the US was rallying friends to confront the Iranian danger before it was too late.
Bush’s customary rhetoric against Iran was not well received in the UAE and in other countries in the region. “Unfortunately, the focus of this epoch-making visit to Abu Dhabi and Dubai has been on the US preoccupation with Iran, rather than America’s strong and healthy relations with the UAE and other Gulf allies,” UAE’s pro-government Khaleej Times wrote.
“Just as the Gulf countries have healthy relations with the West, including the US, they also have historical, cultural and economic ties with Iran,” the newspaper wrote. “The UAE happens to be Iran’s biggest trading partner. This is why the UAE and other Gulf countries wouldn’t want any more confrontation and conflict between the US and Iran. The Middle East and Gulf region, already suffering from two conflicts, cannot afford any more tensions. Peace and only peace is the way forward.”
The US has been trying to paint Iran as a scarecrow to the Arab nations, particularly to the Persian Gulf states, an observer in Tehran told IPS. “But Arab nations seem to be increasingly disillusioned with US policies. The GCC countries say they will not allow any attacks on Iran from their soil. They seem to be more worried by a nuclear Israel that is continuing its aggressive policies without any hindrance,” the observer said.
“Before the UN began to impose sanctions on Iran to stop its nuclear program and the US stepped up its unilateral sanctions, the thriving economy of the UAE, and Dubai in particular, was seen as a serious threat to Iranian economy here,” he said.
“Capital flowed, and still flows, from Iran to Dubai in huge sums in search of safety and profits. Iranian investors are now holding somewhere around $300 billion in capital in the UAE. The trade volume between the two countries was up by 25% last year. The Emirates are profiting in terms of money while Iran benefits by the trade between the two countries that enables its economy to meet the domestic demand for imports,” he added.
The greater part of Iranian imports from the UAE consists of re-exports from the country. This enables Iran to lay its hands on things the unilateral US sanctions have made difficult or impossible to acquire from other sources. The fact is reflected in the figures for the trade volume in the Iranian fiscal year that ended in March 2007, during which the UAE’s share of the $11.7 billion non-oil exports between the two countries was $9.2 billion.
The US lobbying has made things harder for Iranians and their trade partners in the rest of the world but they have found ways of circumvention. Many Iranian companies have registered in the UAE to continue their business and unofficial money transfer channels have taken the place of banks.
“For quite a few years my firm has been importing machinery parts, re-exports from Europe and elsewhere in fact, from Dubai,” the chief executive of an importing company told IPS in Tehran. “Things went rather smoothly in the past, but recently one main Canadian supplier said they couldn’t deal with us directly or they’d be boycotted by the Americans. They suggested that we register a company in Dubai. We had to find a local partner to hold 51% of the shares according to local regulations.”
At the same time, “international banks where we had our accounts asked us to close them and said they would no longer accept letters of credit from Iran’s Saderat and Melli banks, which have several branches in the UAE. This has made us deal in cash and use unofficial money transfer systems, which raises the end price of the imported goods for us,” he said.
Besides economic factors, the issue of the disputed islands was brought up during the UAE premier’s visit. Iran is prepared for talks with the UAE to “remove misunderstanding over the Persian Gulf Island of Abu Mousa”, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini was quoted by Islamic Republic News Agency as saying following the UAE premier’s visit.
The territorial dispute between the two countries over the three islands dates to 1971 when the seven states comprising the UAE gained independence from Britain.
While insisting on its non-negotiable sovereignty over the disputed islands, Iran says it favors talks to resolve the issue. The UAE has in the past sought to settle the issue of the islands that it calls “occupied” through the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
In May 2005, the UAE officially appealed to the UN to arbitrate on the issue of the disputed islands. The UAE’s claim has repeatedly been backed by the GCC members and other Arab states.
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Obama’s “Coalition of the Willing” Against Iran?
Continuity rather than Change in US Foreign Policy
by Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Global Research, November 20, 2008
- 2008-11-19
A Mere Atmospheric Change in Obama’s Foreign Policy: U.S. London-Based Pundits See Rather Continuity Than Change
LONDON – After Barack Obama’s victory in the U.S. presidential elections last week, discussions about what direction an Obama/Biden Administration is likely to follow are gaining momentum.
Invited by the London Middle East Institute (LMEI) on 11 November to speak about the foreign policy of the next U.S. administration, the London-based American analyst Jonathan Paris anticipated an Obama foreign policy much in line with the one of the current Bush administration.
The main areas of concern, he asserted, would be Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. Focusing extensively on the latter, Paris said that sanctions will be kept up with even the aim of aggravating those. Meanwhile, one should not “beg” Russia to join the efforts by the P5+1 – i.e. the five permanent UN Security Council members and Germany – to increase pressure on Iran. Rather would it suffice to wait for Russia to join an anti-Iran “coalition of the willing.” Moscow has so far been reluctant to Washington’s insistence to impose further sanctions on Tehran. According to Paris, who like Norman Podhoretz is an adjunct fellow at the neoconservative U.S. think-tank Hudson Institute, Washington’s overall goal would be to “win over” Russia so to avoid any opposition to its preferred policies.
Drawing on Obama’s campaign announcement to enter into direct negotiations with Iran, Paris stressed that this would test the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s willingness to come along. Although proponents of a thus-designed “overture” vis-à-vis Tehran expect the Iranian leadership to repudiate, other experts point out that such an outcome is far from obvious with the Iranians being seriously interested in normalizing ties with the United States. Paris reiterated that Israel could only attack Iran with U.S. support.
Paris, a Middle East fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York from 1995 to 2000, stated that other spotlights would be Pakistan – which he described as constituting the “prize” –, “the most pivotal state in the Middle East,” Egypt, with President Hosni Mubarak’s succession pending, and Iraq where “corruption” of the Baghdad government would be the core problem without mentioning Obama’s promise to withdraw occupation forces there. While tackling the so-called “rogue states,” of course China would be a central focal point for Washington’s foreign policies, Paris added.
Multilateralism “Yes,” Multipolarity “Not So Fast”!
Paris, who is also a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, classified a future president Obama opting for “cooptation” rather than confrontation, a characteristic attributed to the Bush Administration. While he approved multilateralism, he cautioned against multipolarity whose dawn he commented with occurring “not so fast.”
He described the decision-making process of the forthcoming administration to be “bottom-up,” implying that Obama will be very much acting upon advise given to him. Paris conceded that only “atmospheric change” would come during an Obama presidency.
A few days earlier on 5 November, Mark Fitzpatrick, at a panel on “nuclear futures after the U.S. elections” at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, stated that establishing a weapons-of-mass-destruction free zone in the Middle East could not be found among the top-ten list of an Obama administration. Fitzpatrick, an American senior fellow for non-proliferation at the IISS, said that the main obstacle to launching a regional conference to such an end would be the lack of “mutual recognition” between Israel and Iran. However, he did not mention Iran’s “grand bargain” offer of spring 2003 to the U.S. which inter alia included a de facto recognition of the state of Israel. Washington at that time ignored this remarkable Iranian overture that included Tehran’s willingness to settle all controversial issues in U.S.–Iran relations.1
Fitzpatrick presaged that a future president Obama would command U.S. marines in the Persian Gulf to start communicating with the Iranian navy in order to avoid any confrontation provoked by misperceptions. In terms of nuclear disarmament, he proposed that in the first 100 days of the new administration, the U.S. could de-alert the status of its nuclear arsenal, but preferably doing so only when Russia acts likewise.
In sum, both London-based U.S. analysts did not signal any change of an Obama administration’s foreign policy stance especially when compared to the Bush administration’s second term. Their remarks implied that the U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2002 and 2005 which formed the basis of President George W. Bush’ s foreign policy agenda and which included the Bush/Wolfowitz preventive strike doctrine would not be revised. According to veteran U.S. Middle East expert William R. Polk the removal of the George W. Bush’s NSS, which “threatens Iran with destruction,” would be an absolute prerequisite for any serious change in Washington’s world policy.2 The American pundits rather upheld the belief that there will be continuity in Washington’s strategic outlines and actual policies with Obama and that the only change that could be expected will occur in terms of rhetoric.
Notes
1 See Gareth Porter (2006) “Burnt Offering. How a 2003 secret overture from Tehran might have led to a deal on Iran’s nuclear capacity—if the Bush administration hadn’t rebuffed it,” The American Prospect, Vol. 17, No. 6 (June), pp. 20—25.
2 See Ali Fathollah-Nejad (2008) “Iran Falling into the “Net” of a “Worldwide Policy”: On the U.S. Foreign Policy Doctrine and Its Present Dangers – Exclusive Interview with William R. Polk,” Global Research, 16 October.
Ali Fathollah-Nejad (M.Sc. cum laude, M.A., B.Sc., B.A.) was educated in bi-national study programs in France (Sciences-Po Lille), Germany (U Münster) and the Netherlands (U Twente) covering the fields of political science, sociology, law, history, and economics. His current main areas of research are U.S. and EU policies vis-à-vis Iran and the new geography of power in the 21st century.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11058
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Iranian Commander: Bush’s Iran War Plan Delivered to Obama
The Bush administration has created the required infrastructure for attacking Iran and delivered his war plan to Obama, a senior Iranian military official said Saturday, adding that Obama’s election has provided Iran with a one-year opportunity to increase preparedness.
Addressing a meeting to mark the start of the Week of Basij (mobilization of volunteer forces), lieutenant commander of the General Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces Major General Gholam-Ali Rasheed said that US President George Bush has established the infrastructures required in the region for posing a threat to Iran.
“The United States’ threats have now found a structural form. They have done the planning for reaching the necessary preparedness to wage a war (against Iran) through setting up military bases, holding (security) pacts, etc.,” he said.
The General viewed “northwestern and southeastern Iran as well as the southwestern province of Khuzestan as vulnerable points” the US forces are likely to use if they want to invade Iran, and underlined that the aforementioned areas should become invulnerable within the next one year.
He further urged military officials to leave war rhetoric and expression of foreign policy views to politicians and “accelerate measures to boost Iran’s deterrent power”.
Considering that the country is now under threat, he said, we should consider measures to prevent entering the stage of actual war.
US forces attacked a Syrian village near the borders with Iraq on October 26, and the raid on Sukkariyah, which took place almost simultaneously with an air raid on a Pakistani village, has raised speculation about the likelihood of similar unilateral strikes by the US troops on other regional states, including the Islamic Republic.
Speculation that Israel could also bomb Iran mounted after a big Israeli air drill in June. In the first week of June, 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters reportedly took part in an exercise over the eastern Mediterranean and Greece, which was interpreted as a dress rehearsal for a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear installations.
Israel and its close ally the United States accuse Iran of seeking a nuclear weapon, while they have never presented any corroborative document to substantiate their allegations. Both Washington and Tel Aviv possess advanced weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear warheads.
Iran vehemently denies the charges, insisting that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. Tehran stresses that the country has always pursued a civilian path to provide power to the growing number of Iranian population, whose fossil fuel would eventually run dry.
Iran has, in return, warned that it would target Israel and its worldwide interests in case it comes under attack by the Tel Aviv.
The United States has also always stressed that military action is a main option for the White House to deter Iran’s progress in the field of nuclear technology.
Iran has warned that in case of an attack by either the US or Israel, it will target 32 American bases in the Middle East and close the strategic Strait of Hormoz.
An estimated 40 percent of the world’s oil supply passes through the waterway.
In a Sep. 11 report, the Washington Institute for the Near East Policy says that in the two decades since the Iran-Iraq War, the Islamic Republic has excelled in naval capabilities and is able to wage unique asymmetric warfare against larger naval forces.
According to the report, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy (IRGCN) has been transformed into a highly motivated, well-equipped, and well-financed force and is effectively in control of the world’s oil lifeline, the Strait of Hormuz.
The study says that if Washington takes military action against the Islamic Republic, the scale of Iran’s response would likely be proportional to the scale of the damage inflicted on Iranian assets.
Meantime, a recent study by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a prestigious American think tank, has found that a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities “is unlikely” to delay the country’s program.
Intensified threats by Tel Aviv and Washington of military action against Iran contradict a recent report by 16 US intelligence bodies which endorsed the civilian nature of Iran’s nuclear plans and activities.
Following the US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) and similar reports by the IAEA head – one in November and the other one in February – which praised Iran’s truthfulness about key aspects of its past nuclear activities and announced settlement of outstanding issues with Tehran, any effort to impose further sanctions or launch military attack on Iran seems to be completely irrational.
The February report by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, praised Iran’s cooperation in clearing up all of the past questions over its nuclear program, vindicating Iran’s nuclear program and leaving no justification for any new UN sanctions.
The UN nuclear watchdog has also carried out at least 14 surprise inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites so far, but found nothing to support West’s allegations.
Also in another report to the 35-nation Board of Governors, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei confirmed “the non-diversion” of nuclear material in Iran and added that the agency had found no “components of a nuclear weapon” or “related nuclear physics studies” in the country.
The IAEA report confirmed that Iran has managed to enrich uranium-235 to a level “less than 5 percent”. Such a rate is consistent with the construction of a nuclear power plant. Nuclear arms production, meanwhile, requires an enrichment level of above 90 percent.
The Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog continues snap inspections of Iranian nuclear sites and has reported that all “declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is not diverted to prohibited activities.”
Mohammed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, recently said that Iran remains far from acquiring capabilities to develop nuclear weapons as it is still lacking the key components to produce an atomic weapon.
“They do not have even the nuclear material, the raw unenriched uranium to develop one nuclear weapon if they decide to do so,” said the head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency.
Following the said reports by the US and international bodies, many world states have called the UN Security Council pressure against Tehran unjustified, demanding that Iran’s case be normalized and returned from the UNSC to the IAEA.
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=8709020565
